President Donald Trump’s drive to cancel all diversity, equity, and inclusion programs shows his hostility to the pursuit of social justice and his belief that students should learn a sanitized version of American history, one purged of the stain of racism. But racism in various forms has played a major role in our country’s history, and students should have their eyes fully opened to that fact, as well as to the systemic racism of today.

At the same time, students should not be given an inaccurate or simplistic version of our racist history. Yet that is what Bill Newman does in his March 10 column “Battling Trump’s war on truth and history,” when he writes, “The Constitution, in order to give slave states more power in Congress, counted each enslaved human being as three-fifths of a person.” This statement, if not outright false, nevertheless fosters misunderstanding because it omits the political context in which our Constitution was hammered out.

A little history now.

The Constitutional Convention of 1787 faced a major challenge: How to determine representation in the new government, especially when it came to states with large enslaved populations. Southern states, where slavery was prevalent, wanted enslaved people to be counted fully towards their population in order to gain more representation in Congress and increase their political power.

Northern states, where slavery was less common, argued against this, claiming that enslaved people had no rights and therefore should not be counted at all. To resolve the deadlock, the delegates decided that for the purposes of representation in the House of Representatives and the determination of direct taxes, enslaved people would be counted as three-fifths of a free person.

I was taught this in my high school American history class long ago, and from it I learned a number of life lessons. First, things are not always what they appear to be. While counting slaves as three-fifths of a person would seem to be an instance of unalloyed racism (as Newman portrays it), both its intent and consequence was to diminish the political leverage of the pro-slavery Southern states, thereby increasing that of the anti-slavery Northern states.

Second, making decisions involving groups with different interests often requires compromises in which neither group gets all it wants. In this case the Southern states wanted slaves and their masters to be counted equally, and the Northern states did not want slaves to be counted at all. They compromised on a 3-to-5 ratio.

Third, life requires us to play the cards we are dealt, not insist on a new hand. This sometimes means choosing the lesser evil over the greater evil. Slavery was an entrenched social and economic institution in the Southern states. If our Founding Fathers had not accepted its perpetuation there would be no United States of America today; instead, there would be two countries, one which would probably have maintained slavery for another hundred years.

Eighty years after that compromise, Lincoln declared a war to preserve the Union, but at the cost of nearly 700,000 lives. Both these decisions required weighing the value of a human life against that of a political goal.

Students should ponder the wisdom and morality of those choices. Was the lesser evil chosen? How would they themselves have voted had they participated in the Constitutional Convention? Herein lies the difference between true education and simplistic indoctrination.

Wallis Reid lives in Leyden.